GwenCon Ate Blank White Cards

At the start of Day 2 of Gwen Con '08, I hosted Blank White Cards. I organized two different 2-hour blocks of it.

• The first game was a very low-scoring game. I won, with a measly 47 points. Sarah (my wife) was 2nd place with 12 points. Mike Lee was 4th, at -200, and Aaron Cooke was 5th at -350. My favorite score was Logan Bonner's 3rd place total of -192.8541 points.
• The reason for the low scores in that game was a card I made in the pre-game card generation called "Orky Maff" - it overruled all positive scoring cards to cap them at no more than +6 points. It's a GW Ork reference. This dropped everyone's scores by a ton, till it got killed by a card Logan made named "Elfin Math". But then later, another card was used by Sarah to resurrect Orky Maff, 'cause Logan's score was getting far ahead of everyone. The point of the game isn't really to win, but cards that jostle the whole table's scoring tiers are always appreciated.
• The second 2-hour block had more traditional scores. Kevin Smith (not the famous one) won with 900 points (Clown-filled Manicotti FTW). 2nd place was Aaron Curtis at 701 points, Jennifer Clark-Wilkes was 3rd at 220pts. I and my wife filled out the bottom of the rankings at -150 and -444 points respectively.
• Logan Bonner made really fun cards, by the way - he had us drawing mustaches on existing cards, shouting "Hey you guys!" at the top of our lungs, and doing other goofy stuff.
• Aaron Cooke had a great illustrative touch. He cards look really sharp, and it reminded me of playing with my friend Jeremy back in Albuquerque. (Jeremy's cards have traditionally been the most artistic and grokkable, cards that you just love to have in your deck. Comparing Aaron's to Jeremy's is a high compliment for the new player.)
• There's a natural tendency for each consecutive game of Blank White Cards to get stranger and more complicated. Game 1 always has lots of elegant "just points" cards, while subsequent games get more and more text-based cards. That really bit us in the 2nd 2-hour block. Sarah and I were unintentionally making more advanced cards, but 2 of the 3 other players were just learning the game. The error of our ways became obvious when both those players used a rule on a card to intentionally make themselves lose a turn so they'd have time to figure out what all the other cards in play did. By that point, it was hard to undo the damage. If I host it again next year, I'll run only one 2-hour block per day.
  

If there's interest, I'll take some photos of at least a few of the cards and post them here later this week.